3 min readUpdated: Jul 20, 2026 06:30 PM IST Touches, passes and not giving the ball up Spain were not going to give the ball up. Lionel Scaloni wasn’t even going to try – he said so by relegating his best midfielder, Leandro Paredes, to the bench. France had suffered the consequences of what happened when you dared to try to take on the Spanish. Spain passed the ball 853 times in the final – to put it into context, they passed the ball 715 times in the 2010 World Cup final against the Netherlands with Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets running that midfield. In yesterday’s final, Spain touched the ball over 400 times more than Argentina, again a marker of their abject hold of the game. Rodri-Cubarsi-Laporte’s Bermuda Triangle No World Cup has ever seen the defensive influence of three players quite like the Spanish centre-back pairing of Pau Cubarsi, Aymeric Laporte and deep-lying midfielder Rodri. They took 359 of the 1091 total Spanish touches in the final. Their hold on two-thirds of …